YMMV / The Ring

• Adaptation Displacement: It's fairly well known that the 2002 American film is a remake of a Japanese film. But few know that not only is the Japanese film based on a novel, but it also wasn't even the first adaptation of said novel.
• Alternative Character Interpretation: Is Samara truly evil or is she just a severely mentally ill abused child who lashes out because of trauma, doesn't know how to control her powers, and meant it when she said she can't stop hurting people and she's sorry? Could she be both? Is it possible she started out as the latter and slowly became the former?
• Awesome Music: Kenji Kawai and Hans Zimmer were involved, after all and made an appropriately creepy music for the films.
  • The music that plays over the end credits of the original Japanese film - a remix of HIIH’s song “Feels Like Heaven”; who also created the ending song for its original sequel Rasen “Distorted Clock”. While *that* film is notorious for being maligned, the ending theme’s tone emulates the feeling of the source novel’s ending wonderfully.
  • Zimmer's score deserves special mention; in a far cry from his bombastic themes for Gladiator and Pirates of the Caribbean, here he uses only a piano, and a small string section with violin and cello. And it works.
  • Samara's Song in the American version. Her pictures may be a visual equivalent of this.
  • Creator Backlash: Zimmer hated his work on the first film, so much so that no soundtrack album was released. A compilation album was eventually released featuring Zimmer's work on both films, however.
  • In 2022 La-La Land Records released a 2-CD set of Zimmer's work on the first one.
• Broken Base: There are many arguments between those who prefer the Japanese films over the American films and vice versa (although there are some who like both). Then there are those who believe the films to be inferior to the novels, etc.
• Critical Dissonance: Ring 0: Birthday was blasted by some western critics for, oddly enough, being a so called "rip-off" of Carrie. ^note Because apparently shy female characters with psychic powers are immediately comparable to Carrie even though such characters are Older Than Dirt. A large percentage of Ringu fans meanwhile felt that it was a great origin for the movie version of Sadako, and felt that the emotions it was going for was well written and achieved. It's agreed by most of the fandom that while it was a bit of a departure in terms of themes from 1 and 2, it still worked well on its own and had a sense of saddening beauty to it.
• Cry for the Devil: Sadako, Samara, Eun-suh. Ring 0 is an exercise in this for Sadako.
• Ensemble Dark Horse:
  • For the American film, Anna Morgan (Shannon Cochran). She appears very little in the film, but her presence is felt in every scene.
  • Toyama from Birthday is beloved by shippers.
• Fandom-Enraging Misconception: It's usually a good idea to not say that Ring 0 is a Carrie ripoff to fans of the Japanese series.
• Fandom-Specific Plot: Related to the Technology Marches On nature of the concept, there's a lot of fanart showing what would happen if Sadako were to emerge from a smartphone screen (usually a Defanged Horrors scenario).
• Fan Nickname: "Pointy-kun", "Towel-Head" and "Towel Man" for the white-cloth covered figure gesturing on the tape, who eventually appears as Ryuji and/or Toyama. Samara is called Sammy by some fans.
• Fanon Discontinuity:
  • The Ring Two for fans of the American series. For the record, they tend to consider the short midquel, Rings to be far superior to the second main film.
  • The third film in the American franchise, Rings (2017) is best forgotten by fans, mostly due to mass retconning many important plot elements, introducing new protagonists (with Rachel and Aiden nowhere to be seen), and completely changing Samara's origin story and her motives for killing.
• Fridge Horror: In the American version, Rachel finds out that one of the kids who watched the tape at the lodge died in a motorcycle crash, and she links it to the others' deaths by the time of the accident. The other victims were at home, surrounded by TV's and mirrors and such, so how did she get the kid on the bike? The rear view mirrors? The inside of the visor on his helmet? Passing by some car with all its windows rolled up?
• Funny Moments: There is in fact a rather funny moment within the first US film. When Noah goes to the ward to get the tape containing Samara's session, the medical guard bluntly calls off his lies (being that Noah says he's Samara's father) and tells him he has everything in check in the ward. He ends up opening the tape box to reveal it's gone and drops this line:
  Medical Worker: Okay, now I'm mad.
  • During her stay at Cabin B4 in the Japanese film, Reiko finds a ledger and flips through it. Whereupon she finds a drawing of three stout people and this message she reads aloud, and even smiles at...
  My dad's fat, my mom's fat, so I'm fat too.
• Genius Bonus (American movie version) - Who has even heard the expression "An appointment in Samarra", meaning inevitable death?
• Hilarious in Hindsight: A common joke among horror fans is that, if the film were to be made today, it would end with somebody uploading the tape to YouTube and causing The End of the World as We Know It. The film Truth or Dare (2018) heavily implies that exact ending, as its last two surviving protagonists upload a video to YouTube that forces anybody watching it into their supernatural Deadly Game in order to save their own skins.
• It Was His Sled: At one point in the distant past, the "twist" of the narrative (about how the curse actually works, and why giving Sadako/Samara a proper burial was pointless) and the "coming out of the TV" scene were shocking and surprising elements. Today, anyone who has heard of The Ring knows about the TV scene, which has become so iconic even this wiki illustrates its entry with it.
  • Ironically though what most people equate as "how the curse actually works" as per the film versions was canonically revealed to actually be a wrong in-universe conclusion in the second book all the way back in 1995.
  • Not to mention how the cover of the Region 2 boxset◊ of the original trilogy features Sadako crawling out of a TV set.
• Jerkass Woobie: It's hard not to feel sorry for Samara, all things considered. She may be evil, but she's also a mentally ill 12-year-old child with Abusive Parents who died a horrible death, was born with powers she never asked for, and mostly just wanted a loving family and to be listened to.
• Memetic Mutation:
  • Apparently, when Moe collides with Sadako, Hilarity Ensues in many ways, from Pedobear hunting her to manifesting in disadvantageous situations (cell phone displays, for example) or less-than-wholesome ones.
  • One meme started when a Twitter user took a picture of a ceiling-mounted TV saying they'd watch the movie to ensure Sadako would fall out, leading to a number of ways she would or wouldn't deal with the situation. One of which depicts her simply poking her head out of the TV with a sniper rifle.
  • NOW I'M A BELIEVER ^ExplanationThe famous "I saw her face" scene is often memed with the Monkees(or Smash Mouth cover) song "I"m a believer" due to that song also having the line "And then I saw her face".
• Moral Event Horizon: The members of the theatre troupe in Ring 0, with the sole exception of Toyama, had been needlessly mean to Sadako from the start, but pretty much all of them cross the line when they corner a terrified Sadako and proceed to brutally murder her. When Sadako later comes back to life, thanks to being reunited with her evil half, she proceeds to kill them all in vengeance.
• Narm:
  • In Ring, Sadako's killer smacks her on the head and pushes her down the well. What makes this funny is the loud and unrealistic WHACK sound effect that accompanies the hit. How did they think that was a good idea?
  • At the climax of Ringu 0, Sadako stalks the theater troupe through the woods, psychically killing them one by one, but their death scenes have them simply... screaming and dropping where they stand. Toyama's death, off screen, is much more effective.
  • The scene of the horse committing suicide on the boat can very easily inspire laughter.
  • In the American Ring, Rachel getting knocked down the well because of the TV, followed by Noah attempting to haul some fire hose over to pull her out only to collapse to the ground when the hose runs out almost feels like they came out of Scary Movie due to their sheer goofiness.
  • The scene where Katie finds water seeping from under the door and the lights flickering ominously should be tense and suspenseful, if only she didn't elect the moment to step barefoot on the puddle, effectively the most senseless action on the very assumable possibility that there might be some kind of electrical accident happening inside. The viewer could be forgiven for remembering the line "sheltering myself with a large piece of sheet metal, I ran for cover under the tallest tree I could find!"
• Self-Fanservice: Sadako is the Trope Codifier for the Stringy-Haired Ghost Girl and is usually portrayed as a decrepit rotting walking corpse. Fan artists often ignore the latter and instead Moe her up, with some even drawing her as a buxom and curvy woman. Not without precedence either, as Sadako is frequently described as beautiful by multiple characters in the original novel, and some adaptations like Ring: Kanzenban and the Rasen film use her for sex appeal and have her appear naked. Her looking like a decepit corpse is specifically an invention of the 1998 film.
• Sequelitis:
  • Rasen/Spiral, which was quickly swept under the rug and forgotten about. Some people consider it to be a decent movie in its own right, but ironically, the fact that it's Truer to the Text doesn't make it a good sequel to the first movie, which was a looser adaptation of the source material.
  • As far as the U.S.-made films are concerned, while the first is still regarded as one of the most iconic horror films of the 2000s, The Ring Two is seen as a pretty terrible sequel, and Rings even worse.
• Special Effects Failure: The sight of Sadako's horribly rotted face at the climax of Ring 2 is arguably this when her lips start moving, but it still manages to be pretty creepy. Also somewhat justified, due to the film's low budget.
• Squick: (Novels only) Watching the tape is bad enough normally. A woman watching it whilst ovulating gets a far worse fate, she is impregnated with a clone of Sadako who grows to full adulthood within a fortnight.
  • The movies have their share; Sadako and Samara pulling out their fingernails in their attempts to get out of the well before they die is one example.
  • Finding Sadako’s dead body in the well wasn’t gross enough? Try her entire skin peeling off the moment Reiko touches her.
• Tough Act to Follow: The 2002 film has gone down in history not just as one of the best remakes of a J-Horror movie, but also one of the best remakes ever, period. In addition to the film's sequels not being as good as the original, no other J-Horror remake has come as close to The Ring in terms of acclaim, success, and legacy (the only possible exception is the 2004 remake of The Grudge, and even that has mixed reviews at best)
• Unintentionally Unsympathetic:
  • Samara is supposed to be a Tragic Villain, but it gets borderline impossible to feel sorry for her after the end of Rings, where she intends to kill thousands of innocent people, and she uses the woman who was trying to help her as a vessel to be reborn. On the other hand, it turns out in The Ring that she never actually was that sympathetic to begin with.
  • Kazuyuki and Ryuji in the first book. Even though the first book suggests Ryuji made up all of his claims about raping women and the second book makes clear it would have been physically difficult for him to do with his small genitalia, it's still a disturbing thing to claim and Kazuyuki never went to the police to report an acquaintance was claiming he'd raped a woman.
• Unintentional Period Piece: Besides the obvious one of a cursed video tape, with Rachel being a journalist, the high-tech machines she uses at work instantly date the movie to the early 2000s. All the things she needs special equipment for - rewinding the tape to see certain things, taking a picture from the video - she could easily do on a home computer these days. Katie and her friends also took pictures with a disposable camera, and Rachel has to get the pictures developed. And of course the televisions are all in analogue.
• The Woobie:
  • Sadako. She doesn't seem like a Woobie to you? Just watch Ring 0. Samara might qualify as well; she's only a child when she's killed.
  • Yoichi Asakawa's life has never been the easiest it could have been. Even before the film's events, he often spent most of the time alone due to Reiko's work schedule. Then his cousin Tomoko, father Ryuji, and grandfather Koichi all succumbed to Sadako's curse; the latter in a Heroic Sacrifice for the child. Last but not least, he nearly snapped when his mother was hit by a truck. All of which was topped off with being stalked and possibly possessed by Sadako. Thankfully, he did get better.
• Woolseyism: The Towel Man's hidden message in the Japanese tape is most directly translated as "If you keep playing in the water, a monster will come for you". However, most English subs have instead written the line as "Frolic in brine, Goblins be thine" to emulate the use of Oshima's dialect in the original line.

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